The Serpent in the Chapel

For a while last summer, it looked as if the Presbyterian church was about to lose its virginity to the real-world notion that it might be possible to enjoy a healthy, moral sex life outside of traditional Christian marriage. It was the best chance any mainstream denomination has ever had to modernize and humanize Christian sexual morality, and it arrived with the publication of an official church report, Keeping Body and Soul Together: Sexuality, Spirituality, and Social Justice. The committee that produced the report spent three years listening to sincere Christians who were suffering with the church's stubborn, long-standing refusal to say anything but "thou shalt not" about sexual realities that were all around them. And when the committee members sat down to write, they didn't pull any punches.

"We have been stunned by the scope of sexual pain in our society," read the preface to the report, "saddened by the stories of grief and disillusionment, and repentant that as a denomination we have spoken so cautiously and acted so timidly about sexuality and its many life-centered issues."

Their investigations, they said, revealed "a massive, deep-seated crisis of sexuality in this culture." Then, as they launched bravely into their tough-minded and enlightened proposals for a modern Christian sexual ethic, they suggested that perhaps the way to start was to imagine the Lord Himself as "a gracious God, delighting in our sexuality."

That phrase alone was enough to keep me reading, because it blew away the dark spirit of everything I'd ever been taught about Christian sexual morality. I'll admit that my education in these matters was not ordinary. It was long and brutal and Catholic, with catechism classes, altar service, followed by high school and college under the scholar-thugs of the Church, the Jesuits, who flogged me through eight years of theology and philosophy, Church history and comparative religion. I studied the Old Testament and the New, Saint Paul and Saint Augustine, Martin Luther and John Calvin, all the way up through the encyclicals of the modern Popes, and when these men got to talking about sex, there was deep loathing in their voices.

Which is strange, because Jesus didn't seem to hate sex. In fact, by the evidence of the Gospels, he worried more about greed and demonic possession than he did about sexual matters. And the few things he did say about marriage and divorce were designed to shock his Jewish audience, whose sexual mores were based on macho religious laws that treated women as property. In Jesus' time, Jewish men were polygamous and could divorce their wives for wrecking dinner.

It was an attitude that made Jesus mad enough to knock the stones out of the hands of the crowd that was about to slaughter a harlot; that provoked him to say that prostitutes and tax collectors had a better shot at heaven than the hypocrites who administered Jewish moral law. As far as Jesus was concerned, such religious nitpickers were missing the point of all human relationships: love. The kind of love that shuts no one out.

A man with a message that sweeping isn't likely to spend a lot of energy arguing the rules of who can sleep with whom, and Jesus didn't. That pretty much left the design of a Christian sexual code in the hands of the men who followed him. Unfortunately, most of them were coming off bad sexual experiences, or had no sexual experience at all.

There was Saint Paul, who advised marriage as a second choice for those who were too weak to be celibate. "Better to marry than to burn with sexual desire" is the way he put it.

Saint Augustine was the dark genius who really put the snake into things, who gathered up and packaged the Christian sexual ethic that has kept the delight out of it to this day. He was the man, 400 years after Jesus, who thought up the idea of original sin. At the age of 32, on the heels of a sexual rampage that had driven him mad, Augustine decided that God had given us sexual desire not as a gift but as a punishment for the disobedience of Adam and Eve. It was a mean after-thought, a dirty, unnatural effect that robbed both Adam and Eve of any choice in the matter, which turned them into wretched slaves of lust, filled them with shame and sent them searching for fig leaves. And, he added, the sewing of those leaves into loincloths was about the most useful thing Eve ever did.

For Augustine, all sexual desire was evil and ruinous, even between husband and wife. Sex within marriage was all right so long as you took no pleasure in it, so long as you understood that God wouldn't have made such a degrading act necessary if He hadn't been so damn mad at humanity for its arrogance in the garden. Pudenda—derived from the Latin word for shame—was a perfect name for penis and vagina as far as Augustine was concerned. Did your foot do things you didn't want it to do? Did your elbow swell up and fill you with lust against your will? "Lust is a usurper," he wrote.

Augustine predicted that without hell-fire rules that severely restricted sexual desire, "people would have intercourse indiscriminately, like dogs." And because reason and persuasion had never controlled his own ravenous sexual appetites, he decided that the best way to drive such rules into the hearts of the faithful was by fear and force.

Those in the young Church who argued with Augustine, who tried to put some delight back into the story, were branded as heretics. Those who agreed with him, like Saint Jerome, the sex-loathing preacher who translated the Bible into Latin, assured their sainthood by suggesting various techniques to snuff out the poisoned breath of lust.

"Blessed is he who dashes his genitals against a stone," said Jerome.

•

The spirit of those words was still haunting Christianity 1600 years later in San Jose, California, when the Jesuits turned me and my classmates over to a man who would make Jerome look like a sex therapist.

It was 1960, we were 17 and 18 years old, masturbating like machines, trying to scratch an itch that was too deep to be scratched, about to graduate into a garden of sexual temptation where, the Jesuits were sure, most of us were going to head right for the forbidden stuff. They were right.

But before they watched us scatter, they intended to tell us some true-life stories of the perdition that came to those who thought they knew better than the Church about sexual matters.

For three days, they cloistered us in a Mission-style retreat house—El Retiro—that sat on a California hillside under oaks, pines, palms and eucalyptus. They gave each of us bare rooms and forbade us to talk to one another. They left us nothing to read but religious pamphlets, and turned us over to a specialist, Father Peter Newport, who was to have a few words with us, man to man, about the true nature of our sexuality. He warned us that the things he had to say weren't for the squeamish.

At first sight, old Father Newport didn't look the part. He was a frail man with a bad hip who carried his head down as he limped with a cane to the altar, knelt for a short prayer beneath the stained glass of Saint Ignatius contemplating the Virgin Mary, then rose and turned quietly to begin his lessons. But, oh God, when he got going about sex, he was ice and thunder, torture and death, bleeding genitals and rotting flesh, madness and suicide, rape and disease, coat hangers, broken bottles, souls falling into hell like rain. For three days, we sat like prisoners and listened while he cataloged the kind of ugly truths that had led Augustine and all the other fathers of the Church to the inescapable conclusion that sexuality was given to us as bitter punishment.

He told us about a fraternity pledge at a secular college (Stanford, I think) who was bound and blindfolded, then choked to death in a hazing ritual when his godless fraternity brothers cut a piece of liver into the shape of a penis and stuffed it down his throat; about a young couple who were slaughtered in a traffic accident on their way home from a little fondling and French-kissing, a few minutes of vain pleasure that pitched both their souls to an eternity of molten fire; about a male hitchhiker picked up on El Camino Real, then driven to a lonely eucalyptus grove and attacked by a homosexual more vicious and predatory than a werewolf; about Jesus on the night before his crucifixion, chained to a pillar while his Roman jailers scourged his genitals, then laughed and spat into the wounds.

Augustine would have wept at the awful beauty of it.

But of all the bloody narratives Father Newport sent us off to our dark little rooms to contemplate, there was one that summed it all up for him, that put things in perspective. He hoped we would remember it the next time our blood made its rush down into the shame that hangs between our legs. He shook when he told this one, and delivered the last line in a whisper that I can still hear.

It seemed that a dear friend of his was a Jesuit missionary who had been asked to join a rescue team on its way to the site of an airline crash deep in the moldy Brazilian interior. The team wanted a priest along, on the outside chance that anyone might have survived long enough to(continued on page 200)Serpent in the Chapel(coutinued from page 140) take last rites. No one had, and Father Newport's friend described the carnage they found: Men, women, children, torn to pieces, hung in the trees, strewn like garbage over the jungle floor, where their bodies had lain for days in the merciless heat. All of a sudden, the toughguy missionary wasn't so tough anymore. Because there, among those hundred corpses, he suffered an epiphany so horrible that the only way he could relate it was to whisper it to his old friend in the form of a question.

"Father," he said, "do you know what part of your body rots first when you die?"

•

It's a long way from that jungle to "a gracious God, delighting in our sexuality." I suppose that if Father Newport weren't dead he'd say, "What do you expect from Protestants, anyway? I'd rather see a boy dead at my feet than watch him become a Protestant." But the truth is that though most of the reformed churches are somewhat more liberal than the Catholic, the body-hating, fear-mongering pessimism of Augustine stands at the heart of their restrictive sexual teachings, too.

The Presbyterians, for instance, allow divorce and birth control, and have been ordaining women ministers since the Fifties. Still, they condemn all sex outside of marriage—including, of course, gay sex. It's a position that leaves the ministers of the church with no guidance to give, no comfort to offer the faithful who struggle with the real-life dilemmas that arise as sweeping cultural changes widen the gap between what the church teaches and what people actually do.

That gap between behavior and belief prompted the Presbyterians to form the Special Committee on Human Sexuality and to ask it for recommendations on how the church might work to ease the pain, confusion and guilt and, at the same time, staunch the flow of half a million members out of the denomination in the last 20 years.

Predictably, conservatives in the church were against any study of sexuality. If people were in pain, they said, it was because the leaders of the sexual revolution had tried to edit a moral order written by the hand of God. The Bible, they insist, speaks clearly and unequivocally on fornication and homosexuality.

Most scholars will tell you the opposite: The Bible speaks clearly and unequivocally on just about nothing at all. It's the product of too many sources and too many authors, for one thing. On top of that, its stories come to us by a twisted linguistic route that has seen them translated from Aramaic to Greek to Latin to English, from culture to culture, from one age to another. They are now so far from the source that to read them without careful, informed interpretation can result in meanings the authors never intended. For instance, "sodomy," which is generally used by Christians as if it were synonymous with homosexuality, refers, in Genesis, not to gay sex, but to murderous gang rape.

Conservative Christians, of course, never have been much interested in subtleties of language, at least not when they go against things they wish to believe. They prefer what they call a more literal reading of the texts, which always reminds me of a tale about a little translation trouble Coca-Cola encountered when it introduced Coke into China a few years ago. When the company translated its ad line "Coke adds life" into Chinese, what they got was "Coke brings your ancestors back from the dead."

In a way, bringing the spirit of their ancestors—Augustine and Jerome—back from the dead is exactly what fundamentalist Christians would like to see. The opponents of the Presbyterian report argued against it by calling for a full retreat to old values. And what you needed for that, they said, was faith, not another study. Especially not a study authored by the liberal types appointed to this committee: doctors, nurses, professors, a renegade minister, even a sex therapist. Traditionalists immediately challenged the make-up of the committee as being unrepresentative of the general church membership and predicted that if such a group were sent out to study human sexuality, its recommendations would only cause trouble. And when the report was published in early 1991, their worst fears were realized.

"The crisis of sexuality," the report began, "is, in fact, a massive cultural earthquake, a loosening of the hold of an unjust, patriarchal structure built on dehumanizing assumptions, roles and relationships. This unjust structure stifles human well-being and stands in contradiction to the Gospel mandate to love God and neighbor as self."

It was quite an opening salvo. In one paragraph, the authors of the report said that the church not only had gone off the track with its negative sexual attitudes but that its suspicion of Eros, its separation of sex and spirituality, its unyielding rules and pronouncements, had also put the church in opposition to the heart and spirit of Jesus' teachings.

The signs of the crisis lay "not in the divorce rate, but perhaps [in] the number of loveless, spiritless marriages." And the roots of the trouble grew from fear and injustice: "We are too often a fearful people, unable to keep sex and sexuality in proper perspective. More tellingly, we suffer from distorted power dynamics between men and women, between gays and nongays and between the married and the single."

Then, having defined the crisis, they expressed the dilemma in blunt terms. "We face a moral choice," they wrote. "On the one hand, the church can retreat into silence or, worse yet, participate in a reactionary effort to buttress traditional patterns of oppression and sexual exclusion. On the other hand, the church can work diligently to dismantle this dehumanizing edifice."

With that introduction, the authors boldly pushed on to outline a set of principles based on social justice that might serve as a foundation for a new Christian sexual ethic. It was not, they insisted, an ethic of relaxed standards or sexual license. In fact, it was a call for a higher, more demanding morality, one that would rule out any sexual relations that abused, exploited or violated the people involved, whether or not they were married. Common decency, not fixed rules, would be the guiding principle of the new standards. They would not exclude or condemn any sexual expression in which equality and mutual respect were present. They called the new ethic justice-love, and said that central to its spirit was accepting responsibility for our actions, staying faithful in sexual relationships and being willing to learn from mistakes.

The heart of the report discussed in great detail the way such principles could give moral sanction to a wide variety of sexually active people who had been branded as sinners by the old ethic. That included teenagers and single adults whose relationships met the tests of justice-love. It also included gays and lesbians who, they noted, had suffered particular brutalities under prevailing church attitudes, and whose exclusion from the ministry was "an affront to the good God who made us."

As I read the report, it was hard to imagine that many of the old-guard Christians would get past the opening sections, which accused them of oppression and patriarchy, of misinterpreting the Bible in order to run a cruel and unjust sexual agenda that was white, male and middle class. These were fighting words, and the church fundamentalists had seen them coming and were ready.

Before the report was published, Presbyterian conservatives had already begun heating tar and slashing pillows. Several members of the committee broke away to issue what they called a minority report, reactionary groups mounted a highly organized and emotional campaign against it by spreading the lie that it condoned adultery and fornication.

By the time the Presbyterian general assembly met in June to vote on whether or not to adopt the report, debate had turned to fire storm. Members of the committee were accused of trying to turn Presbyterianism into a fertility cult. They got hate mail. Their thoughtful, compassionate attempt to allow Eros a healthy place in the life of the church was called "barnyard theology."

Meanwhile, the report was selling like nothing the church had ever published. Ordinary church reports sold maybe a couple hundred copies. By the time of the general assembly vote, Keeping Body and Soul Together had sold an astounding 42,000 copies (at five dollars each), and the church ordered another 13,000 to be printed. (Copies may be obtained by phoning 800-524-2612.) Nevertheless, on the eve of their convocation, most Presbyterians were predicting that the report was wildly out of touch with the pew-sitting majority of the church and that their representatives in the general assembly would defeat it soundly. As it turned out, that was an understatement. On June 12, 1991, the vote of the general assembly was 31 for, 541 against.

Later that summer, Episcopalians and Methodists also doused the spirit of renewal. Both denominations had before them resolutions that could have undone the Christian condemnation of gays and lesbians and offered them full church membership, including, in the case of the Episcopalians, ordination. The Methodists remained divided on the issue, refusing either to condemn or to condone homosexuality. The Episcopalians decided to continue to allow local bishops to ordain gays and lesbians, but stopped short of adopting the practice as official church-wide policy.

At that point, I imagined Saint Augustine, Saint Jerome and old Father Newport falling back into peaceful sleep after a moment that must have found them all rolling at least once in their graves.

•

I haven't been a Christian for 25 years; still, there was something in me that couldn't help rooting for the notion that maybe Jesus had something a little different in mind, something a little warmer than what his message had been twisted into. When that spirit went down like the troops at the Alamo, I felt an old anger well up again. It's the same as it's always been, I thought: Whenever there is a spark of joyful humanness, it will be drowned. If the old dead candle even threatens to jump into flame, the leaders of the Christian churches will get up a bucket brigade that would empty the sea, if that's what it took to put out the fire. Nothing has changed.

In the real world, of course, every time the church hierarchy affirms the hard line, its priests and ministers are left on the battlefield like medics without bandages, doing the best they can to save the wounded. And in many cases, their improvisations simply ignore the official teachings of the church.

Sometimes it's a practical matter of survival, as one conservative Presbyterian minister from Minnesota told me when we talked about life in the clerical trenches. "These days," he told me, "ministers are asked to officiate at marriage ceremonies where the couple has almost inevitably lived together. Everybody knows that it violates the moral beliefs of the church. But if the pastor tries to hold that position, he's likely to get a hysterical call from the parents of the bride, who are prominent church members. If you want to look at it in the noble light, you can say he makes his choice according to the dictates of his conscience. In the less noble light, you can say that if he marries them, it's because the power brokers in the congregation will see to it that he doesn't pastor that church anymore if he doesn't."

Sometimes the difference between church law and the advice its shepherds give is a matter of compassion. "In ministry, pain sets the agenda," is how the report describes what happens to those who face suffering day after day.

When I asked a New York Jesuit what he would say to a married couple who asked him about birth control, he talked about circumstances and intentions, and then said that under certain conditions he didn't think artificial means were necessarily sinful.

"That's not what the Pope says," I reminded him.

"I dissent," he said.

Later in the conversation, he did a wonderfully Jesuitical tap dance around the subject of divorce, in which he told me that the rules for Catholic annulment were now being interpreted to allow even long marriages that resulted in children to be declared void by the Church, thus permitting remarriage. Just a decade or two ago, only unconsummated marriages were eligible for such treatment.

Talking theology with Jesuits always leaves me feeling like I've been hand-sorting eels, but, finally, it is hard for me to blame them, or any of the clergy I talked to, for whatever tortured logic they are forced to use to humanize the pastoral hand of Church morality.

When I asked John Carey, the head of the committee that wrote the Presbyterian report, why he thought the church still refused to close the distance between official belief and what people actually do, he said fear played a major role.

"We live in a culture that has inherited very negative attitudes on sex," he said, "and in our report we were attempting to undo some of that. But it's very complicated. On the one hand, we talk about it as a gift of God and a source of joy, fulfillment and satisfaction. But on the other side of that, sex contains some element of human vulnerability, which means there is great potential for exploitation, abuse and pain. I think that's why the church continues to feel that it has to be controlled and tightly limited. But the limits the church currently imposes tend to alienate and ostracize many people—women, gays, singles, the poor—and these people bear great pain as a result. That's why any commitment to sexual justice entails a commitment to social justice. And that means we have to see through the nature of patriarchy, which is tough going in American culture, because it goes right to the heart of things."

When we talked about the crushing rejection of the report by the Presbyterian General Assembly, Carey said that it wasn't the total defeat it seemed.

"The right wing in the church wanted the report condemned," he said, "and that didn't happen. The general assembly acknowledged the importance of issues we raised, and they authorized the use of the report, which means these things are still on the church agenda. I think we have to consider that something of a victory."

For some of those I talked to, however, small gains are not enough anymore.

"I'm tired of gradual victory," said Malcolm Boyd, when we talked about the summer struggles of the church. Boyd is a gay Episcopal priest and author who has suffered with and written about the cruelties of Christian sexuality for more than 30 years. "I'm tired of a certain segment of the population claiming ownership of Jesus Christ and of morality, and then daring to tell the rest of us what we can and should think. The church is afraid of sex, and it's a fear of mystery, of spontaneity...almost a fear of God. It's time for the great religious bodies to get with it, to take the risk of fundamental change and accept the pain that goes with it."

And if they don't?

"They could end up like the all-white church in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, which spent years agonizing over whether or not to accept black members. Finally, they voted to let them in. The next Sunday they braced themselves for the horde that they expected would descend on the congregation. Not one showed up. If the church waits too long, nobody's going to care."

Somehow, though, as angry as he is with the old church morality, Boyd's faith wouldn't let him end our conversation on a hopeless note. "But you know," he said, "we're not in a stationary situation, not ever. Christianity isn't a closed corporation. God is dynamic. He has never ceased to move or to create or to be."

•

"I'm not exactly sure when they stopped busing seniors up here for those retreats," said Father John Bisenius, an affable young Jesuit who helps run El Retiro. "Probably sometime in the late Sixties."

We were walking the hillside trails I had walked 30 years before. It was spooky to be back, despite the quiet, overgrown beauty of the massive oaks and old orchard trees, the smell of the pines, the big, blue view of San Francisco Bay. When I asked about Father Newport, Bisenius said he'd died sometime in the Seventies, and though he'd never met him, he'd heard stories about him. Then he assured me that the style and content of the retreats had changed dramatically.

"For the most part, these days," he said, "they cover spirituality and prayer and relationship with Jesus Christ. There's no emphasis on sexual matters anymore. When they do get into sexual ethics, the tone is much more positive."

When he showed me a schedule of retreats—open to Catholics and non-Catholics—the titles did seem to reflect a New Age consciousness. There was one called "Inner Freedom Through Imagination and Body Movement." Father Bisenius was co-leading that one, and he talked enthusiastically about the positive nature of the mind-body connection.

As we climbed a trail that was flanked by small statues that dramatized the Stations of the Cross (Jesus bears his cross, Jesus is stripped of his garments, Jesus is nailed to the cross), I asked Father Bisenius if we could visit the Garden of Agony. He looked puzzled. He'd only been retreat master for a few months, but he'd never heard of anything called that.

It was an olive grove, I told him, with a statue of a grieving Jesus set up to resemble the scene in the garden of Gethsemane, where he spent the last night of his life contemplating the evils of humanity—especially the sins of the flesh—that doomed him. Father Newport had sent us there several times a day to meditate on the consequences of our lust.

No, said the priest. He didn't know of anything like that on the property.

Maybe I made it up, I thought to myself as I walked to my car. It's been a long, long time; long enough, maybe, for my imagination to add its own demonic details to the nightmare. But I didn't believe that, any more than I believed the Church had changed its heart about sex.

I was almost to the car when I spotted the sign—on a hidden hillside at the back edge of the property—nailed crookedly to the trunk of an old tree. THE AGONY, the sign read. And a few steps down a short trail, there it was: the statue of Jesus, kneeling in the deep shade of 30 or 40 huge old olive trees. His forearms rested on a rock, the look on his face was pathetic and his eyes were pointed toward a heaven obscured by the canopy of branches.

It's still here, I thought, whether the young Jesuit knows it or not; the image of Jesus frozen in permanent sorrow by the people who lead his Church.

I knelt on the flagstone kneeler near the statue. It hurt, but just in my knees, not all the way down to the bottom of my soul, the way it did when I was 18, when I believed that suffering and denial were what this passionate village preacher had been asking for through his example. Now, I know: There has to be room for delight in this olive grove.

Call me when you put a smile on that statue, I thought, as I made my way up and out of their miserable little garden.